sábado, julho 01, 2017

Causality Violation SF: “Version Control” by Dexter Palmer

“For months now, Rebecca had felt what she could only
describe as a certain subtle wrongness – not within herself, but in the world.
She found it impossible to place its source, for the fault in the nature of
things seemed to reside both everywhere and nowhere. Countless things just felt
a little off to her.”

In “Version Control” by
Dexter Palmer

A lot of the
debate around this book must be surely undermined by the lack of a clear
definition of time.

The idea of time
'moving forwards or backwards' is just a metaphor that people adopt because
it's easy to identify with physical objects that move and since time is a
dimension- a dimension of space-time, the continuum in which everything has its
being. Time itself doesn't 'move' or 'pass' any more than length can pass or
move. However, everything moves, or occupies a series of different points, in space-time.
I also suspect that our perception of time as a progression in one direction,
with a remembered past and a future of multiple unrealized possibilities, is a
'fiction' or mental construction that allows us to make sense of cause and
effect. If we could imagine a being outside of space-time, whether God, or
Vonnegut's Tralfamadoreans, that being would see all those points
simultaneously. As we do when we remember someone's life.

You think SF
can't be literature? You think there is a procedural difference? This is going
down the Delany 'paraliterary' route. I suspect most readers who expressed a
preference would say that they are generally rather keen on ideas. In fact, the
literary-fiction crowd often use 'the idea is the protagonist' as a stick with
which to beat SF. The problem is that the notion of travel comes from movement
through space. When we're standing still, and on no conveyance, we are not
traveling relative to the world around us (of course, the planet is traveling
through space). But in the case of time, when we stand still, we are indeed
moving forward at the pace of life in time. So, in that context, time travel must
mean more than that standing still movement - it must mean traveling faster
than that to the future, or at any speed at all to the past, which does not
happen at all in natural life time. One view of time is that is does not
actually "pass”, as we experience it, and that there is nothing uniquely
real about the present. There is a 21st century and there is a 15th Century,
there are lions and there are trilobites. The past or future are not less real
because we do not exist in the same plane with them, any more than distant
universes, separated from us by the speed of light, are less real because we
cannot perceive them. I think it was Einstein who put it that people who
understand physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future
is only a stupid illusion. The events, say, in a person's life, can be viewed,
not as a cradle to grave time frame, but as continuous arrow that can be
narrated in any order. Forwards, backwards, or hopping around like an ant on a
chessboard. This view of time is explored in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse
Five", and a 'backwards' version in Dick's "Counter-Clock
World". This kind of time-travel is, I'd argue, consistent with physics; Time
cannot 'move' because it doesn't occupy a physical location from which it can
move. As Palmer states:

“But in real life, connecting two naturally
non-contiguous points in space-time such that a corporeal object can move from
one to the other is extremely difficult! And it’s not really moving through
time that’s the problem: moving through space is the problem.”

The idea of time
travel was first set out by H G Wells but since then, like the internal
combustion engine, very little of the idea has changed. We still generally
think in terms of a machine or cabinet that propels the passenger backwards or
forwards in time. Think for one moment however of the written word used by Mr.
Wells to convey this idea. The book was written in 1895 following thoughts
happening inside his head. Without the written word, those thoughts would have
remained trapped in 1895 unless some form of aural tradition of storytelling
had taken it forward. Hence thoughts inside Mr. Wells' head have traveled from
1895 to 2017 and beyond.

There's two
basic ways of thinking about time, one is it’s like a film reel, the present is
the frame that's currently being illuminated by the projector, the past is the
film that's been through the projector and it might conceivably be possible to
move back to it, there are two debatable models for the future - the film that
hasn't been illuminated yet, one is that it's there on the not yet seen frames
just waiting to be illuminated, so one could conceivably travel to them, the
other is that those frames are blank and the image is created on them as they're
illuminated.

The other time
concept is that it's like a (cathode ray tube) TV, the present is the image you
see now on the screen but neither the future nor the past has any meaningful
existence, an image that was on the screen, the past, is simply gone, and an
image that will appear on the screen, the future, doesn't exist yet. The reason
you cannot travel back (or forward) in time is because all the matter you are
made of will suddenly be the same as matter already existing in the universe.

I'll explain.

If you travel to
the past before you were born, all the matter you are made of now would have
been around in different forms. If you travel to the future after you are dead
your matter will be in your ashes, decomposing bones, cells that constantly renew
and reform and absorbed into the great cycle. Once that matter is exposed to
the same universe the quantum force known as spooky action at a distance comes
into effect, it forms a massive feedback loop and annihilates itself. That is
why we don't see time travelers in the real world. The reason you cannot travel
back (or forward) in time is because all the matter you are made of will
suddenly be the same as matter already existing in the universe.

There's more
than one way to skin Schrodinger's cat. And Palmer found a way to do it. Who
would have thought that tackling Big Data and quantum physics in addition to
more mundane subjects like marriage and friendship would produce a novel of
this magnitude?

“And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether
the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as
they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines
knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you
liked the things Big Data told you were likely to like, and you loved the
people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data
entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps,
irreversible.”

Palmer does it also
with Einstein-Rosen wormholes, in a way that feels not only thoughtful but new
and unreservedly fun. And now when I thought modern SF was going down the
drain…

NB: Anyone
looking for an explanation as to why we don't see time travelers should seek
out John Varley's novel "Millennium". I believe in time travel. It
explains why Simon Cowell looks younger every year.

2 comentários:

Great post. I just finished up "Children of Dune" today and while it isn't dealing with time travel, it IS dealing with time and the whole Past, Present, Future. Of course, Herbert's ideas are all based on there being no outside, omniscient Being. Once you throw that into the mix, then things get really interesting.

Which is why real life will always trump fiction, even if fiction is easier to deal with :-D

Seminal piece of literature. I place Dune among other great works of the time; it's also Every time I re-read it what keeps popping in my tiny little brain is Lucas's shameful rip-off. Time to re-read Dune methinks.

Worth noting how completely Dune (well, Dune 2) changed the world of videogames too. The actual "first" RTS depends on how loosely you define the concept, but Dune 2 was the first that contained all the recognisable tropes of the modern genre, and it invented a lot of those tropes. It's hard to name a more influential or imitated videogame of the post 8-bit era. GTA 3, perhaps.

I think the story arc of A Song of Ice and Fire as a whole is rather like that of Dune (though it's not necessarily a story arc that originates from Dune). Powerful family is betrayed and largely slaughtered, then the surviving child escapes to the wilderness where he is trained up in order to come back an take things back. Which is where GoT seems to be going, except with the Paul Atreides role being shared out among the Stark children.

And Daenerys, who is actually rather closer to the Dune model, in terms of going out among alien cultures (especially the Dothraki), and of being the odds-on favourite to be the expected messianic figure of that world.